The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids is structured so that parents and professionals can use it in group discussions. Questions at the end of each chapter and below were developed to guide book-club discussion groups, parent discussions at your child’s school, faculty in-service workshops, community center support groups, or individuals while reading the book. Certified trainers from Sanity School® may also be available to provide onsite assistance.
Although The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids stands on its own as a framework for raising and educating complex kids using a coach approach, it was also created to accompany the Sanity School® behavior-therapy training program for parents or teachers. Groups can be convened to watch the virtual trainings together or independently, followed by group discussion. Sanity School is available virtually on demand, with in-person trainings offered by certified trainers in specific locations globally.
Ideally these questions could be broken up into six sessions.
• How can letting go lead you to parent or teach from inspiration?
• What could a fresh start look like for you, starting now?
• Discuss how strengthening relationships, with yourself and your family or class, can improve things for your child or students.
• What interferes with your relationships (e.g., judgment, blame, resentment, etc.)?
• Which of the four parenting phases do you typically see yourself in? Where does your child need you to be more often? Your students?
• Discuss the value of taking aim very specifically compared to taking aim on general problems.
• Where do shame and blame interfere with your ability to support your child/students?
• Discuss forgiveness. Who wants or needs forgiveness? From whom?
• In what ways are you a “good fit” for your quirky child/students? How are you not?
• Discuss naughty vs. neurological in the context of taking a disability perspective.
• What would be helpful for you to accept?
• What would it mean for you to put the stick down?
• When are you really putting on your oxygen mask first? When are you not?
• Discuss how strengthening relationships can improve your life.
• What gremlin messages keep you from feeling confident?
• What’s the potential benefit of pacing yourself for the marathon, as it relates to your parenting or teaching?
• What’s important to you?
• Discuss the difference between responding and reacting.
• What’s important about activating the brain?
• Discuss the six aspects of executive function.
• Discuss the role of motivation for complex kids.
• What’s the value of ownership for complex kids?
• How are you thinking differently about the use of rewards?
• In what ways do you tend to catastrophize? Discuss.
• How do you currently manage your own triggers?
• What feeds you?
• When do you most need to activate your brain, and what are some ways that you do that?
• What will kids/students remember about the tone of your home/classroom in twenty years?
• In what ways do you (or can you) play to your child’s/students’ strengths?
• How are you unintentionally setting expectations of perfection?
• What are the obstacles and opportunities to make it okay to make mistakes?
• How do you connect with your child/students?
• How is perfectionism impacting your life?
• How can you apply radical compassion to yourself?
• How does your child/student struggle because of unrealistic expectations?
• What stands in the way of you meeting kids/students where they are?
• Discuss the relationship between consequences and punishment.
• Discuss the potential impact of assuming best intentions on your child/students.
• How are you setting unrealistic expectations for yourself?
• How can assuming best intentions support you?
• Who are your greatest champions?
• Discuss the difference between fixing and problem solving.
• How are you focusing on results at the expense of the process?
• What’s the impact of making things too complicated or rigid?
• Discuss how successes can lead to solutions in other areas.
• What are your challenges with failing forward?
• What’s the value to you of keeping things simple and flexible?
• Share and celebrate recent successes in putting yourself back onyour list.
• What’s the value of a collaborative agenda?
• Discuss the opportunities for and challenges of getting buy-in.
• Discuss how language can empower kids to take ownership.
• What opportunities do you see in using A.C.E.?
• Discuss the value of kids/students learning from questions instead of beind directed.
• When are you “telling” when you could be “asking”?
• Why is asking for and accepting help such an important life skill?
• Discuss the reasons your kids/students resist asking for or accepting help.
• How do you catch your kids/students being good?
• Discuss the value of adult transparency for children and teens.
• Why is asking for and accepting help important for you?
• Brainstorm potential behaviors when code words that could be useful for you.
• How can a focus on progress over perfection support you?
• How can transparency take pressure off of you?
• What unusual victories can you celebrate?